I can’t speak for our editing team, but I read “A Clockwork Orange” at an impressionable age and may have had something like “doubleplusgood” in mind when i misused “nonplussed.” (I have not looked up doubleplusgood so am not sure of the spelling, spacing or punctuation.)

So I’m guessing what could have happened would be this. The voter overvotes, the machine rejects it, the voter declines a new ballot, the election judge overrides it and then the ballot ends up in the machine waiting for one or both sides to argue that the vote is for them when in fact the voter did not vote for either. If that is the case, then that is problematic.

I also had the chance to listen as the auditor and other election officials talked about votes other than filled in ovals that the machine picked up. In cases where a stray mark is inside one oval but another oval is filled in solidly, the machine picked up as an over vote. In cases where an x was put in the oval, the machine picked up without a problem.

Machines can’t pick up circled names, and they also don’t pick up where voters try to “complete an arrow”. We used to have that kind of vote indicator, and other states like Wisconsin still do. This is where an arrow pointing to the candidate’s name must have its middle section filled in. The opti-scan ballots have markings down the side that some confused voters filled in as though they were the arrow type. The canvassing board members gave those votes to candidates whose names were opposite.

During the the recount, the count of the ballots that weren’t contested was virtually identical to that reported by the machines. So we need to use the machines to our advantage. They can anonymously look at the ballot and make a decision as to the “goodness” of it.

Unless the difference between two candidates is so close that a manual recount is triggered. Then, even voters who are less than perfect get their say.